multiplayer

Last week we learned Brawl Stars would be coming to Android on December 12th. As of this morning, Supercell has announced on Twitter that the global rollout is already complete, which means you can now download Brawl Stars from the Play Store and start digging into the latest multiplayer arena fighter from Supercell.

Pokémon GO is the poster child for augmented reality. Niantic didn't make quite as big a splash with its first AR game, Ingress, but our collective millennial Pokémon-themed childhood ensured that the company's second effort had a very different reception. Now Niantic looks to be making an investment for the future, as it's just purchased Escher Reality, a startup specializing in backend (read: multiplayer) solutions for VR.

Remember that scene from every action movie ever, where the headstrong but academically challenged hero has to be walked through an on-the-job lesson in bomb defusal by the specialist on the other end of the radio/phone/hyperspace ansible connection? Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes is basically that experience, set up for two players (the on-the-job hero and remote specialist), and designed to create the maximum amount of tension possible. It debuted on Steam last year, but now it's available on the Play Store for early Daydream VR users.

In 2013, the Daily Express ran an informal poll that determined Winston Churchill's famous response to a Parliament member, "Yes I am drunk, but in the morning I shall be sober and you will still be ugly," to be the best insult in history. That's certainly debatable, but it demonstrates that the Brits love a good jape, the more cutting the better. That attitude has been given life in Oh... Sir! The Insult Simulator, a turn-based combat game where insults are your weapons and words are your ammunition.

It's not often that we see an Android game released just for Android TV, aside from the various exclusives that NVIDIA has acquired for its SHIELD set-top box. Hotlap Heroes eschews smartphones and tablets and insists that players experience its old-fashioned racing action on a full-sized television. The 3D racing game, a rookie effort on the Play Store from developer Team Pea, is $3.99 with no in-app purchases.

There's a new paradigm in strategy games. Whereas the old guard in real-time titles like Starcraft, Age of Empires, and Command & Conquer tended to get more complex with each release, the point of Auralux and its imitators is to boil strategy down to its purest components. It does so by making offense, defense, and resource gathering all more or less the same game mechanic, in the tradition of Galactic Conquest (AKA Galcon). Now the sequel to Auralux is out, and it's looking pretty great.

Here's a blast from the past. The original Galcon came to the Play Store when it wasn't even the Play Store - back in 2010 it was still going by the name "Android Market." It was a super-simple strategy game, adapted from an almost ancient PC shareware title called Galactic Conquest. The original mobile game was quite a popular one - sort of a Threes for the real-time strategy crowd - and today the very welcome sequel has arrived on Android.

While the likes of Activision and EA keep spinning their wheels with endless iterations and only a few modest twists on age-old genres, indie developers continue to outclass them with a fraction of the resources. For example: Ultimate Chicken Horse. Not only does this Kickstarter-funded platformer embrace local multiplayer (something that seems completely alien to AAA publishers these days), it tasks players with building the stage itself before the action begins, combining elements of Minecraft and Mario.

Psst. Hey, Pokémon fans. I know you're all very busy obsessing over Pokémon Sun and Moon, the new entries in the main game series, after the starters were revealed this morning. But those games are still months away, and you need something to fill the Pokémon-shaped hole in your soul until then. Well I have good news, Poke-faithful: the official online digital version of the Pokémon Trading Card Game is now out of beta and available as a regular old vanilla download on Android tablets. Have at it.